Texas stoner doom legends The Sword celebrated the 15th anniversary of their sci-fi concept album Warp Riders with a full playthrough Saturday at The Bellwether in Downtown Los Angeles. Lead singer and guitarist JD Cronise announced the end of the band due to creative frustration in 2022, only to play a successful one-off show at Austin’s Levitation festival in 2024.
That epic gig was released as a live album and must have sparked something, because Cronise says that the band isn’t just touring on their classic album; they’re currently working on their first new material since 2018. The fans’ pent-up demand was palpable at The Bellwether.
I was feeling under the weather and missed Pink Fuzz’s opening set. Listening to them on Spotify, I hope I get a chance to see them live soon. The lovely Bellwether staff guided me in and kindly directed me to the photo pit where Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol was already playing an eardrum-bursting set. In fairness, the stage speakers were perfectly at my ear level. Until now, I really thought I understood all the ways the sacred texts left to us by Black Sabbath could be reinterpreted, but I never could have foreseen Doom-Wop. Silly, angry, a little irritating, but underneath are “big dumb riffs” in songs that could easily be on an Adult Swim soundtrack. In a truly crazy band with an 8-string guitar, I found myself most impressed with the squatting, bounding, and practically balletic stage moves of bassist Aaron Metzdorft, practically doing a Robert Trujillo crabwalk at one point.
In honour of Warp Riders’ 15th anniversary, much of the music played between sets was space and sci-fi themed. I was so inspired by the disco remix of John Williams’ Star Wars Theme that I even busted out my own Tobey Maguire-in-Spider-Man-3 dance moves to the amusement of two Metallica fans on the barrier who had their own Travolta-inspired moves. I came expecting to celebrate the bands of the 70s that influenced The Sword, like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, but I did not expect to enjoy disco dancing with my fellow metalheads.
One boisterous, bespectacled gent in a white Hawaiian shirt caught my eye amongst the crowd between sets, laughing with friends, dancing to space-themed tunes like The Beastie Boys’ Intergalactic. The unspoken dress code for metal shows is black, and one is encouraged to dress like a biker, a vampire, or a ninja–preferably all at the same time. If you ever want to stand out, all you have to do is wear something completely incongruous in a bright colour, like that one guy at every metal festival in a Pikachu onesie. Later, from my balcony vantage point, I caught that white Hawaiian shirt just in time to watch him toss himself into the moshpit with abandon, only to stagger out a few seconds later holding his face.
I’m always interested in what bands choose as their pre-show intro music. It’s their one chance to set the stage for the entire set, often with someone else’s music. The Sword linked The Warp Riders to hip hop’s greatest sci-fi concept album with the title track from Deltron 3030. Del had played The Bellwether less than a month ago, and more than a few fans mouthed the lyrics along with me as the band took to the darkened stage.
The Sword opened with a mix of songs from their first three classic albums and the experimental High Country. Although I’d heard live albums and seen live videos, The Sword floored me in person, like a date who looks better than her pictures and wants to smoke you out and talk your ear off about her favourite sci-fi novels.
True to the night’s theme, The Sword covered David Bowie’s Space Oddity. This heavy version made the most of the original’s orbital vibe, replacing the acoustic guitar strums with sustaining distorted power chords while keeping the empty spaces. Shrieking harmonic notes recalled the darkness of another legendary interplanetary band, Failure. As a huge fan of Bowie and Failure, this was the highlight of the night for me.
I changed my mind about the highlight as soon as The Sword opened their Warp Riders set with Acheron/Unearthing the Orb. This perfect album opener, overflowing with riffs and grooves, got all heads banging in unison. The circle pit roiled like a human ocean on the right side of the crowd. My camera and 45-year-old joints were safely ensconced on the other side. Speaking of joints, there were only a few plumes of the “sacred smoke” mentioned in the next banger, Tres Brujas. How LA made such a poor showing, I don’t know. I admit I was so focused on my first photo gig after a long layoff that I forgot to bring my Penjamin to enjoy after I got my shots.
Stone cold sober, I was able to fully appreciate the tightness and power of the band. It’s easy to write them off as a high-quality Sabbath clone, but The Sword has never stuck to one sound or one theme long. Warp Riders is arguably their strongest and certainly their most cohesive artistic statement.
No longer content to reference George RR Martin and Norse mythology, Cronise devised his own setting of a tidal locked planet with one half in perpetual darkness, the other in perpetual light. The Sword’s version of sci-fi is less like Star Wars and more like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic vision of Dune–the famously unproduced film was even to have a score by French prog metal band Magma. The narrative plays out not exactly in order, like Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, with each song setting up a character and their dramatic tension, paying off their fateful meetings and deaths in the next songs.
Night City is reminiscent of Bowie’s Suffragette City, with the breakneck pace of the song embodying the dizzying speed of the metropolis filled with killers and space pirates. Chronomancer I: Hubris and Chronomancer II: Nemesis sound like Judas Priest and Clutch were trapped together on a spaceship with nothing to do but rock out and tell tales of a magus to outdo Mr. Crowley.
The Sword’s encore featured two bonus tracks from Warp Riders. I had to change my mind a second time about the highlight of the night as they closed with their must-play signature song, Freya. If you were going to listen to one song by the band in your entire life, it should be this paean to the Norse goddess that introduced a generation to The Sword in Guitar Hero II.
As the crowd spilt out into the night to have a smoke and chow down on danger dogs from friendly street vendors, I took note of the many Metallica, Iron Maiden, High on Fire, and Acid Bath shirts. I focused on several Black Sabbath and Mastodon t-shirts, no doubt worn in memory of the recently deceased Ozzy Osbourne and Brent Hinds. Their bodies are gone, but the sounds they made are forever ringing in our ears. My own eardrums ached and echoed with riffs and mythologies laid out by The Sword as I drove home. I can’t wait to be enlightened and deafened by whatever they forge on their next album.
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